Jesse Cortez

I’ve been working on the website for the Wak Shack Salon for a few years now. The current Flash main site needs an update in a pretty bad way since I don’t condone the use of Flash in that way anymore. Well, a rebuild based on HTML/CSS/Javascript is surely around the corner. In the meantime I did get their WordPress Blog going, and it ain’t looking half bad. Also, if you are in Sf and need some hair services, you could do a lot worse than visiting this fine salon located in the Lower Haight neighborhood.

I just created this little flier for an upcoming Burlesque Show in San Francisco that is being produced by Bunny Pistol of Barbary Coast Burlesque. The artwork is from an old Italian Horror Movie Poster… so my claim can only be to the typography treatment. But anyway… a little project I had a good time with.

Well, I did get my soapbox racer done for the derby on Nov. 1st. I met with success in that I actually built it in two days! It even had fully functioning steering and a brake! Unfortunately I didn’t really get a chance to use the latter since it was soooo DAMN SLOW! I blew it by going cheap on the wheels. I bought the $8 non-ball bearing wheels from my local hardware store Pagano’s. I think these wheels would be great on a lawn mower, but the plastic and brass bushings they roll on just caused too much friction to keep me moving at a decent pace (or any pace at all).

I did just order some better wheels from Ebay. I’ll get those on the soapbox as soon as possible and take it out for another run.

The cool part was that my friend Murilee Martin dropped by to see the soapbox project and did a write-up about it on Jalopnik.

I’ve decided to build a soapbox racer for the 2009 soapbox derby in SF on Nov. 1st. I have no experience with this whatsoever, but how difficult can this be? The only rules, as I understand them are that the car can’t have a motor, but it must have a beer holder. Okay, no problems there.

So far I have a seat from an old Austin-Healey Sprite and four wheels from the hardware store. This weekend I start in on building the chassis. That means I needs so materials. Lumber yard and ALCO Metals, here I come!

I just thought I would share a couple of flash animation pieces I did for an online art class for the Academy of Art University. These were for a graphic design portfolio class, a way to add some life and interactivity to some potentially dry subject matter. Was flash necessary to convey this information? No, probably not, but a typical AAU online course includes about 150 web pages of text and still image content, so its nice to gives students something shiny to play with here and there.

Although… I’m not so into Flash anymore. I don’t care for the program interface, I think the plug-in isn’t as universal; as it used to be, it doesn’t work on mobile… Overall it’s not as easy to develop or deploy. It’s still agood platform for delivering video… except to mobile devices. Blah!